Prison Program Aims to Get Teens to Avoid a Life of Crime

11 November 2010

This is the VOA Special English Education Report.

A program in the eastern United States invites young people into a prison to try to scare them away from prison. The goal is to teach them to avoid bad choices and bad influences that could put them behind bars for life.

Students can take a tour of the prison, in school groups or by themselves. At the end, the young people sit down for a discussion with some of the inmates.

The program is called Prisoners Against Teen Tragedy, or PATT. It takes place at the Maryland Correctional Institution-Hagerstown, a medium-security prison for men. Sal Mauriello is a case specialist there.

SAL MAURIELLO: "We have a group of eleven inmates who are in the PATT program. They tell the youth what they went through as a child, what their crimes consist of. They try to teach them about peer pressure. They try to teach them about bad choices."

The Prisoners Against Teen Tragedy program also includes an essay-writing contest.

Scholarship winner Tomi Dare speaks to inmates

Tomi Dare is a seventeen-year-old student at Hagerstown Community College. She saw an announcement for the contest on her college website. To enter, students had to write about peer pressure and why they do not do drugs. The prize: five hundred dollars for school.

In her essay, Ms. Dare wrote about her own experience growing up as an African-American girl interested in sports.